


Dance, Dance

by Thimblerig



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Gen, Legal issues, M/M, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2019-06-18 01:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 10,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15474858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Constance wants a man, Milady likes her lover, Aramis is looking for a lawyer, and Athos... really needs a hug.And there's tango.





	1. A Cure For Broken Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Marriage In Convenience](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14936852) by [Anathema Device (notowned)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notowned/pseuds/Anathema%20Device). 



> // A very late companion piece to Anathema Device’s lovely “Marriage In Convenience”: 
> 
> Points in common:  
> \- fake marriage  
> \- immigration issues  
> \- Aramis/Athos  
> \- Athos has sworn off sex  
> \- a dance school and tango  
> \- Porthos has a son by Alice Clerbeaux named Jules

**Tango For Beginners, Mixed**

Constance teetered from foot to foot in the crowded corridor of the Community Centre. Echoes bounced off the thin walls; squeaks of heels on waxed lino sounded like dismal bird song. What was she doing here? Two left feet, she had. She should go before she embarrassed herself. _This is why you’ll never be loved…_ Jacques-Michel’s words sounded again in her ears. _Oh God, you’re crying again, you know I just ignore it now, right?_  
  
She tilted her chin up and let her two neat braids swing down her back. She was underdressed for the occasion in a flannel shirt over a t-shirt, daringly accessorised with comfy jeans and trainers.  
  
_At least you’re not embarrassing my friends this time. I can’t introduce you to anyone..._  
  
Constance strode through the crowds and tugged open the door. Inside was a medium-sized room, comfortably lit, adorned with piano music from a battered upright in the corner played by an upright grey-haired woman in lavender wool. Five couples danced counter-clockwise around the room; they were… very much not beginners. She slapped her forehead and backed out, but not before one of the dancers saw her and gave her a discreet thumbs-up and a wink. Blushing furiously she shut the door firmly. _At least you’re not embarrassing…_  
  
“Fuck _you,_ Jackie-Boy,” she said aloud.  
  
A woman gurgled with laughter behind her and she spun, cheeks even redder. “Wrong class,” she said, nodding to the **Sexual Wellness** sign across the hall.  
  
“Could this evening _be_ more mortifying?” Constance asked.  
  
“I don’t know, I haven’t asked you out and been shot down yet.”  
  
Constance blinked. The woman was taller than her, elegant as a stiletto, with eyes like absinthe that blinked, cat-like. “I’m not gay,” Constance said.  
  
“I’m Anne,” the woman said, and touched one of Constance’s braids. “Sooo pretty,” she cooed. Behind her, a tall young man with too much product in his hair dropped his takeout coffee cup.  
  
“You’re doing that to mess with the bloke behind you,” Constance said.  
  
Anne smiled and shrugged. “Two birds, one stone. Why shouldn’t I monopolise the pretty girl, so delightful when she blushes?” Despite Anne’s poise, fine wrinkles of tension showed in the tiny muscles around her eyes. There were shadows under them, not hidden by the makeup. Constance grabbed her cold hand and tugged her closer, close enough to feel her body heat. “You’ll have to impress me in class, first,” she whispered, eyes sparking in challenge. Anne smiled, predatory.  
  
A door opened and bodies shuffled around them. A grave sweet voice said, “If you’d like to come into my _práctica…”_  
  
  
**  
  
  
_three years later_  
  
Constance sat at her dance _maestra’s_ dining room table in the light pooling around a single lamp. “I need to get married,” she said.

Ana, their host, looked at her solemnly, then at the short tumblers before them, on crocheted coasters, and the near empty bottle of Glenlivet, also on a coaster, and finally at the dark woman on whose lap Constance sat, holding her in a light, responsive embrace.

“Yes…?” she hazarded.

Anne chuckled, amused. “She wants a man.”

“My Nanna keeps talking about how she wants to see me married before she passes,” Constance said, worried, fingers rucking up the denim of her pants. Anne covered one restless hand with her own.

“We _could_ just fake it,” the darker woman said carelessly. Constance frowned. Anne added, “but knowing our luck, she'd hang on for five more years and we'd have to maintain the farce for all that time. We _should_ do it,” she told her lover decisively, “it's practically philanthropic.”

“I can't lie to Nanna,” Constance said.

“So instead you're… going to fake a wedding for the law…?” Ana said dubiously.

“The law does not come to Sunday dinner.”  
  
Anne tossed back her whiskey in one gulp and slammed the tumbler on the table. She scooped up the bottle but her lover took it out of her hands, frowning under her straight fringe. Anne showed her teeth. Constance ignored her and drank straight from the bottle, tipping it up and swallowing the last few drops. Anne said nothing, watching Constance’s white throat move.  
  
Ana rose with grace and paced to the kitchenette. She filled the kettle and clicked it on, rummaging through the cupboards for her third-best teapot.  
  
When she returned she placed three mugs with ugly cats on the table, poured amber brew in them with long-trained grace, and spooned in more sugar than was probably good for either of the younger women.  
  
She leaned back in her chair, steepled her fingers, and said, “I can supply a man.”


	2. The Law Comes to Sunday Brunch.

It was a little row house among other houses, the front yard framed by a knee-high wall of old brick, its faded red made brighter by the damp green grass it framed. Athos stepped through the low, open gate, up the red-brick path.

The pale green door swung inwards under his knocking hand.  
  
“Come in!” a woman’s light, polite voice carried over the petit-thunder of a child running. Inside was a neatly furnished front room, light and airy despite limited space, and he saw a fair-haired woman sitting straight and composed on one end of a satiny, flower-printed sofa. A man was sleeping on it, mismatched socks propped up on the far armrest and his long and lanky body stretched out with his tousle-haired head on the lady’s lap. “Excuse me if I don’t get up,” she said, smiling slightly, threading her fingers through his haphazard curls. “I’m sorry, we did not hear you were coming until a little while ago.”  
  
Athos coughed and mumbled. The man on the couch snuffled.  
  
“Oh, that’s just Aramis,” a small fair-haired boy said, shoving his feet into trainers and tapping the toes against the floor to settle them. Athos jumped as a piercing whistle sounded behind him. “Coming, Porthos!!” the boy shrieked, scooping a soccer ball up in one arm and jostling past him down the brick steps. Across the street a large dark man in a very small car waved, while a child of about the same age plastered his hands on the glass of the rear window. “Bye bye, Mama!”  
  
“Be safe, Louis!” the woman called, fair eyebrows crinkling. The man on the couch did not stir, chest rising and falling smoothly under a white t-shirt and a soft grey cardigan.  
  
Athos cleared his throat and adjusted his tie. “Is this a bad time?”  
  
“Not at all,” she said, “the more the merrier. I'm Ana Bourbon, by the way.” Her head tilted as Athos set down his briefcase. “My friends are just making tea,” she said, nodding to an open door where two women were talking, voices light and merry over the dull chiming of porcelain knocking together. “And if we play our cards right,” she added gravely, “there shall be croissants and muffins.”  
  
“One must not neglect the croissants,” Athos answered, with automatic politeness, and Ana Bourbon beamed. The sleeping man breathed deep, one hand flexing on his belly. “Er,” said Athos. He preferred his daily work, on the premises of his law firm, where there were appointments, and everyone was awake, and with luck he would not have to speak with someone he did not know _all day._ “If I’m interrupting something…” The man’s cardigan was too large for him, and the sleeve bunched around his arm, falling down to the knuckles as the elegant fingers flexed, unconscious of the viewer. “I can come back later.”  
  
“One moment,” Ana Bourbon said. She touched the man’s temples lightly, tilting her head down. _“Querido,”_ she murmured, very soft, as his eyes opened. He murmured something back in Spanish too soft and fast for Athos’ long-ago book-learning to follow; he turned his eyes away from the intimacy of the scene.  
  
The woman’s voices sounded louder, and footsteps on lino - he looked up, at a fresh-faced young woman with auburn hair in a simple print dress manoeuvring an enormous platter of pastries, salmon, cream cheese, and sliced fruit. She turned her head, blushing slightly, and her companion stepped up behind her, a dark woman, black tresses piled high and skewered with a sharp pin, staring with furious care at the tea tray in her hands. She was blushing herself, a delicate pink in her cheeks, eyes lowered. They were poison green, Athos knew. Words froze in his throat - just one cry, _“Anne.”_  
  
She looked up and saw him. “Olly?” she asked. The tea tray dropped.  
  
  
**  
  
  
Aramis’ head bounced off the couch cushion as Ana rose suddenly.

“I'm sorry,” she was saying rapidly, “you're not Connie’s cousin, for brunch?”

“No,” a man replied awkwardly. “I was… I was looking for Anne. When I called at her house, they said I should come here. I didn't, I didn't mean to -”

“It's fine,” she said, “I'll just - wait here and I will speak with her.” She walked away, and suddenly Aramis could see a dark-haired man, tall but slightly built inside a neat jersey, blue-striped shirt, and dark slacks. Aramis was tired still, the banging of pipes in the last flat he'd been forced into for lack of papers wearing him out all last night. But the visitor sat there, shoulders tight, as women spoke urgently in the kitchen. Aramis waved a reassuring hand, and sat up.

 _“Buenos días,”_ the man said to him politely.

 _“Buenos días,”_ Aramis answered. _“Cómo está?”_

The man faltered. “I don't actually have much Spanish,” he said.

 _“No te importa,”_ Aramis answered cheerfully. _“Es sólo, me gustaría decirte que tienes bonitos ojos.”_

The man squinted, then pointed dubiously at the corner of his, very pretty, eye. Aramis nodded enthusiastically. _“No son verdes, no son azules. Muy bonitos...”_ Women’s voices raised in the kitchen and the man’s eyes strayed. _“No las mire,”_ he chided and, as the man looked back, added, _“Me llamo Aramis. Soy como un chile verde, picante pero sabroso...”_

“How big is this pepper, exactly?”

As Aramis choked, he added dryly, “I listen better than I speak.”

Footsteps. Anne came back in, high-stepping, head proud, a knot of tension in her carriage. “Stalking me now, are you?”

“It's just the divorce papers,” Athos said tiredly. “Last time you said that the mail was disrespectfu-”

“Don't put this on me,” she snapped. Athos winced, then snapped open the briefcase and withdrew a thin sheaf of papers. “Just sign at the coloured tabs, and it's done.” It hovered in the air, and Anne reached out to touch it. They stilled, in that moment, like two dancers making that first touch before the embrace. Then Anne snatched it and stepped back. Constance touched her arm lightly, and they retreated into the kitchen.

“I'm getting married,” Aramis said into the silence that followed. “Offering up my fair body unto Constance for… reasons.”

Athos raised up his pretty eyes again. “You're not involved with Ms Bourbon?” he asked, curious.

“Ah, Ana and I are dance partners.” He shrugged. “And I am very, very gay. I imagine it won't last long, but if it pleases a lady...”

Athos’s head lifted, like a dog scenting a deer. _“Tell_ me this isn't a citizenship thing.”

“And why not?” Aramis asked, curious.

“It's bonkers.”

“Athos specialises in immigration law and deportation cases,” Anne said, returning with the papers signed in sweeping flourishes of vivid ink. She held them out, carriage relaxed and open this time, then said, reluctantly, “he's very good.”

Aramis felt the smile blossoming on his face.

“Reaaaaally?” he purred.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // The Spanishp…
> 
> Ana: “Dear”  
> Athos: “Good morning.”  
> Aramis: “Good morning. How are you?”  
> Aramis: “Don't you fret. It's only that I would like to tell you that you have pretty eyes.”  
> Aramis: “Not green, not blue. Very pretty.”  
> Aramis: “Don't look at them [the women]. I call myself Aramis. I am like a green pepper, spicy but savoury...” (This last is from a Mexican folk song, “La Llorona”, so he is perhaps, being a bit cheeky. (If he wasn't already.))
> 
> Special thanks to myhamsterisademon for checking the grammar for me.


	3. Milonga, Practica

Constance was dancing leader tonight, and had dressed for it in high-waisted woollen slacks, cut loose for easy movement. Her shirt was buttoned with silver, her auburn hair was twisted in a low knot at the nape of her neck, and she held Anne’s cool hand as they walked down the rain-speckled street, her solid Cuban heels clacking in complement to the _tick tick tick_ of her partner’s stilettos, and the swish of her silk skirt.

“We're not talking about Athos,” Anne said harshly as they walked.

“Alright.”

“Even thinking about him makes me so very _cross,”_ she added.

“Alright.” Constance squeezed her hand comfortably.

“We're really not.”

Constance spun her lover into a turn and crowded her against a wall, white bricks painted with a swirling graffiti of clockwork turning into a rose, and threaded her fingers carefully into Anne's coiffure. “Three things you like,” she commanded. “Now.”

Anne's eyelids lowered, catlike, as she considered. “The taste of your lips. My new toothbrush.” Constance kissed her lightly. “I'll stick with the taste of your lips,” she said, smiling.

 _Maestro_ Gallagher’s _milonga_ favoured the _tango nuevo_ style, flashy, a little experimental, the dancers moving easily from an intimate hold, cheek to cheek, to an open embrace suitable for dazzling footwork and turns, then back into a clinch. Constance and Anne dominated their place in the outer ring, with artistry and style and intense focus on each other. Constance knew, with satisfaction, that appreciative looks were on them. When the _tanda_ was over and they were flushed and breathless, a tall young lad with skin like bronze and velvety dark eyes caught their eye from across the hall. Constance and Anne shared a laughing look, then Anne nodded slightly to the boy, and swept towards him across the dance floor. He tossed his straight black hair, gulped, and straightened.

“She'll eat him alive,” Constance muttered wryly to an old friend standing beside her.

Lemay laughed softly. “D'Artagnan will enjoy every bit of the devouring.” He raised his eyebrows and she smiled and took his hand.

 

**

 

“No, I'm a voice actor,” Aramis said, clambering up a light aluminium ladder, and whacking the trapdoor in the ceiling with his palm until it shifted. “Tango is… a bit more than a hobby,” he added, voice growing muffled as he disappeared halfway into the ceiling of the studio he and Ana shared with a flower arrangers’ collective, two t'ai chi schools, and an Easy Breathing health class, “but it doesn't entirely pay the bills.”

The ladder swayed dramatically as he tugged at a battered attaché case and Athos steadied it hurriedly, ignoring the warm brush of his worn jeans against his cheek as the man manoeuvred out of sight.

“How long have you lived here?” Athos asked levelly.

“All my life,” Aramis answered, freeing the case with one last jerk and almost tumbling off. A strong hand gripped his belt and steadied him, and he smiled quietly.

“My mother came over from Belize in ‘72 with baby-me in her arms,” he added once the ladder had been folded neatly away and he and Athos perched at a side table on mismatched chairs.  Unsnapping the case brought forth a cloud of old dust and they both sneezed, Athos’s eyes growing very red at the edges. “A bit of a family scandal, I believe,” Aramis said. He shrugged. “They didn't -” he waved an awkward hand - “they processed citizenship differently at the time.”

“Belize was still a Crown Colony in ‘72,” Athos answered softly. “You're of the Windrush Generation.”

 _“Sí.”_ Aramis beamed, picking out a fresh white letter from his case.

A familiar bubbling rage settled in Athos’ belly. He picked the form letter out of Aramis’ hand, eyes scanning the brief, familiar phrases - a demand to _provide proof of citizenship, chum, or pack yer bags…_ He'd seen duplicates in the hands of families turned out of their homes, banned from work with small children to feed, elderly men and women preparing for retirement, in need of healthcare, who'd spent their entire working lives propping up the pylons of the country...

Aramis pulled back, watching his face. “Steady on, old chap,” he said in an unnerving public-school drawl.

“What do you have in the way of records?” Athos rasped, pulling himself back in.

Aramis frowned. “Taxes, work records, I wrote to my old boarding school...”

“Birth certificate?”

He wrinkled his nose. “I've a copy of _Mamá’s_ landing card somewhere, I'll keep looking.”

“It would be very helpful.”

“I'll look. Will you come to the wedding?”

“You're not still going through with that,” Athos said, very dry.

“You want me to disappoint a lady?” Aramis quirked his eyebrows, hurt, and dipped his eyes to a stack of old photographs - Porthos in dress uniform with a medal around his neck, its metal almost as bright as his grin; Ana holding her son as a baby, the light from the high window shining through her sweat-straggled hair and lighting her features clear as any madonna; Constance and Anne, glowing with exertion and the kind of effusive joy that refuses to be contained - Athos made a small sound and Aramis covered it over quickly with a handful of sepia-tinted snapshots from his childhood.

The lawyer sorted neatly through the paperwork, then stopped, curious, as Aramis upended the stack of photographs, layering them out in patterns. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

The other man frowned. “Just missing one… it's probably caught in something.” He laid his hand, fingers protectively spread, over the array of sepia snapshots. “Don't worry, I'll find it. Is there enough to build a case?” he asked cautiously.

Athos tapped his finger on a tattered old form idly, frowned, and then mimicked, _“Sí.”_

Aramis beamed and held out his hand curled into a loose fist. Hesitating, Athos bumped his own knuckles against it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _a swirling graffiti of clockwork turning into a rose_ \- I borrowed this off a wall in my town. *shrug*
> 
> // _You're of the Windrush generation_ \- so the short version of the Windrush Scandal is that from 1948, for several decades, it was really easy to settle in the UK for everyone who was at that time a British subject by virtue of having been born in a British Colony. The Windrush was the ship that brought in the first echelon, from the Caribbean, and it's nicknamed the whole process. Because they had automatic right of settlement, they didn't go through the same citizenship process as outside-outsiders, and didn't get the same documents/get put in the same records. And all was well and good for several decades, despite a few changes in countries’ membership in the Commonwealth… until a governmental shift to a “hostile environment policy” in the name of discouraging illegal immigrants put a huge load on supplying documents (some of which no longer, or never had, existed) on people who had lived their entire working lives in the country, perfectly legally, and were heading for retirement… More here:
> 
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
> 
> Most of the people in the crossfire seem to have been from the Carribean, but I did read an interview from one woman from the British Honduras/Belize, so that's where I placed Spanish-speaking Aramis’ country of origin. (I'm fudging his age slightly. Clearly the man has good genes.)


	4. Tipos de Abrazos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there, sorry for the wait.

“I'm so glad you're getting married,” Constance's Nanna said, eyes twinkling behind silver-rimmed glasses.

She was a woman once plump and rosy as an apple but age had wrinkled her and drawn her down, shrunk into herself. But sweetness lingered in her and Constance breathed a little deeper to be in her rooms. Her Nanna held out a gilt-edged teacup and Constance refilled it with sweet amber tea. Without comment, Anne spilled a drop of another amber liquid from a silver flask into the cup. Constance took a breath. “It's within my daily allowance,” her Nanna said. “Don't be such a prude, Connie.” Anne's red lips curled in a smirk.

“Constance tells me you were a nurse,” Aramis said brightly.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I trained in the war. I was on the beaches at Normandy.”

Constance looked up, startled. “I didn't know that, Nanna.”

The old woman chuckled. “Every good woman has a few mysteries tucked away. Gives her bottom.”

On the other side of the low table Aramis beamed. “And a very fine one you have, Ma'am.” Athos, brought along for ‘moral support’, choked on his tea as the old woman glowed at this transparent flirtation.

She genially ordered her grand-daughter to fetch down the tin box of photos from the top shelf - no, not the one with the sad beagles on the cover, the one covered in air balloons - and opened it to show ancient photographs, gesturing them round to see women in short capes and stiff nurses’ caps with their arms around each other, laughing at the camera operator; the outside of a huge cross-marked tent with a calico cat walking tail-up in front of it; a portly gentleman in a jeep, adjusting his general's hat and the rankers clinging, straggling and dangling, to the back of it to catch a ride.

Her finger drifted over a dog-eared, black-and-white photo, blurred and much marked, of an ancient, battered vehicle with a cross on the side. Leaning against it was a figure, tall and wide-shouldered, with dark hair cut in a curly halo and a cigarette barely holding its position in a widely grinning mouth. “That was Twiggy,” she confided to Aramis. “You never forget your first love. Not that my husband Eric wasn't lovely!”

“Did Twiggy die?” he asked softly.

“On VE Day,” she said. “What a terrible cliche.” She sniffed. “It probably wouldn't have worked, what with one thing and another, but I would've liked to have _tried,_ young man, I wanted that.” He covered her hand and she smiled at him. “You terrible charmer. Now, Connie tells me you're a dancer.”

Aramis’ smile blossomed.

Anne stayed seated, ceding Constance and Aramis the best view of the photographs. Nearby, Athos asked her softly, “How can you do this? Put yourself in the shadows like this? You must hate it.”

Anne stared at him, eyes for the moment washed clean of artifice. “Constance is… loyal,” she said at last. _“Stupidly_ loyal, and she'd do the same for me. So I can do this for someone whose idea of ‘family’ is more than a slap and a scream.”

“I'm worried you'll be hurt.”

Her mouth twisted. _“Now_ you care.”

“But I do.”

The smile that followed was small and a little broken. “I believe you.”

With a light scrape of denim, Constance stood and refilled the teacups, avoiding mention of another little drop of whiskey as her grandmother and Aramis complimented each other's pretty eyes. She paused when she reached Anne and rested her hand on her lover's shoulder, squeezing lightly. Anne covered it and squeezed back, eyes shining. Athos’ throat knotted up.

Nanna looked up again from her old pictures. “I'm so glad you're getting married,” she told Constance, eyes twinkling.

 

**

  
“I don't think you should get married,” Athos told Aramis later, when he had dropped him back at the studio.

“I want to see how it plays out between my friends,” Aramis said, stepping lightly inside and flicking a switch. The fluorescents flickered on as he stepped inside, doffing his _nice_ blazer, and stretching out his arms in his blue-striped shirt. He rolled his neck and sighed. “I like Constance's Nanna. And her photographs,” he added with a wink.

Athos frowned at him.

“I'm incurably romantic,” Aramis said. “Will you trust me not to break any hearts?”

Athos hesitated.

“Will you forsake your legal services on my behalf?”

Athos shook his head firmly. Aramis’ smile blossomed again and Athos stilled.

“Stay for class,” Aramis invited.

“I'd rather not,” Athos said, face closing up.

“Constance would be hurt,” Aramis purred, “if you did not dance at her wedding.”  
  
“I don’t know how to dance,” Athos said flatly, “especially not something as complicated as tango.”  
  
“Then you’re in luck,” said Aramis, “because this is just walking, when it comes down to it.” Athos made a polite noise of disbelief. “Walking together,” Aramis clarified, “to music. Don't worry: I'll steer.”  
  
He watched Athos, the man’s face still, almost as if in pain.  
  
“Tango doesn’t have to be a sex thing,” he added, and saw the man twitch.  
  
“Back in the day,” Aramis said conversationally, “in Argentina, there were many, many more men than women. If you wanted to dance with a nice girl at the _milonga,_ you had to be good before you asked, or she would not enjoy the dance and everyone would scorn you, and it would be a long time before you might ask again… so the men, they practiced together, trading off the roles as they learned, very brotherly. Mostly brotherly,” he clarified, eyes twinkling. “And I have found that the best leaders learn also to follow.”

He stepped to their little sound system in the corner, and the steady cheerful accordion of “A Media Luz” filled the room. “It begins with a look,” he said gently. “I catch your eye across the room, and if you don't want to try me you look away. _No importa.”_

“And if I do?”

“A little nod.” He watched Athos, a few metres away, watched the man’s neat chin move. “Then,” he said, drawing towards the man, “the embrace.” Lifting his arms, right arm high and left out, hand turned up and offering, he let Athos step in and settle, easy as a bird settling on a branch, setting them up in a v-shaped hold - close, to feel each other, open enough for feet to stumble a little. Novice though he was, Athos had a beautiful stance, balanced and alert, knees relaxed. “I am going to walk you backwards,” Aramis said, took a breath, and moved on the release. 

It wasn't like fencing.

Athos would never wield a foil to the strains of a cheerful singer nattering on about his nice little flat, so comfortable for guests _do_ come up, for one thing. It did not smell of old sweat and steel.

And yet. He could feel the sprung power in Aramis’ legs, the focus and timing, the core of energy in the man that Athos himself answered to. It was the easiest thing in the world to follow the slow steps and the quick, like little laughs in the music. “I'm going to take you round a _giro_ turn now,” Aramis told him, eyes bright and dancing.

It had been so long since Athos had been so close to someone. The warmth of it almost burned.

“And -” Aramis took a breath.

Athos kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _tipos de abrazo_ \- “types of embrace” As a tango term, it applies to how the dancers hold each other - close, open, flexible etc.
> 
> Incidentally, yo he estado aprendiendo español por un tiempo, and if any Spanish-speakers want to comment in their native tongue or point out grammatical issues in the story, I will do my best to keep up. (Gracias)
> 
> // _Gives her bottom_ \- I don't know where this saying comes from, possibly the Age of Sail where the bottom of a wooden ship's hull was of intense importance to the people travelling in it over deep ocean. In any case, “to have bottom” is to have endurance and staying power. Also, I tend not to skip opportunities to make dodgy puns, there's that, too.
> 
> // “A Media Luz” - is an old tango song about the singer’s nice little flat, furnished so neatly and the light comfortably low. No neighbours, no concierge, the only cat is porcelain so it won't make a noise… wanna come up and hear my tango music? *eyebrow waggle* - music and lyrics here: 
> 
> http://www.tanguito.co.uk/tango-culture/tango-lyrics/tango-lyrics-a-media-luz/


	5. The Kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the short chapter. They insisted on doing it this way, enacting the scene on a bare black stage with one spotlight illuminating them.

Athos’ lips were warm, and he smelled of expensive cologne with a bottom note of alcohol. He kissed lightly, almost chastely, and Aramis took it for what it was, returning the warmth and friendship as best he could but not deepening it. The lawyer hummed deep in his chest, trembling under Aramis’ hands, and despite himself, Aramis’ lips parted.

Leader, follower, the roles shifted as Aramis felt himself carried, _worn_ by the older man, the flow of feeling running pure and deep between them in the embrace. He smiled against Athos' lips. "A Media Luz" played on around them, cheerful, unregarded; one of the fluorescent lights flickered overhead.

Athos’ hands shifted, resting at last on Aramis’ chest, the thumbs touching his collarbones through the thin shirt. He breathed raggedly, resting his forehead against Aramis’. The span of his fingers widened and Aramis shivered deliciously.

Athos shoved himself away. His shoes squeaked on the floor as he staggered, recovering his balance as if he had been hit though Aramis stood metres away, rooted and still.

Aramis lifted his empty hands. “Easy, easy, my friend. It's only the tango.”

Athos stared at him wild-eyed, then fled.

Aramis touched his burning lips. The hydraulic door of the salon hissed shut over fading footsteps. “That could have gone better.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _as Aramis felt himself carried, worn by the older man_ \- one of the tango commentators I was reading mentioned that one of the original words describing what went on between leader and follower was _llevar,_ which can be read as "to carry," or "to wear," and it sort of slipped into the scene.


	6. Castigado

“I feel a great sadness when I look at you,” Aramis said firmly. “And it is not of yearning. No. Our hearts have beat as one and I feel your sorrow.

“So you run: that is well.” His long-lashed eyelids dropped. “But perhaps,” he purred, his voice deepening, roughening, a hint of flint under the velvet, “perhaps this time you make a different choice. Perhaps tonight, my lovely, you _stay._ What then?”

His voice broke. _“Stay with me.”_ He paused a breath. “End of Chapter 12.”

Aramis lifted padded earphones off his head and blinked again at the lit up words of _Lilac Under Earth,_ latest in a series of supernatural romances, the letters swimming slightly in front of his eyes. He grabbed for his sippy cup of water and lemon juice. It was cool sliding down his throat. He cocked an eyebrow at the man on the other side of the glass-walled recording room: his producer, a stout grey-haired Yorkshireman, said solemnly, “I would do you.”

Aramis flashed him a grin.

“You've got company,” his producer added, nodding to a young woman standing beside him in the sound engineer's cubicle. She was slender and light on her feet, in an airy, flower-printed dress cut formally enough at the throat and sleeves to be professional, its colours bright and graceful to please the eye, with her hair drawn back into two puffball ponytails. Aramis liked her immediately.

“Sylvie Baudin,” she said, offering her hand as they walked down the carpeted hall of the little recording studio to the canteen. Aramis took it, and felt her return his grasp with a firm squeeze. “I don't have much time today, but I'm here to touch base after taking over your case from my partner, Athos Delafere.”

“But -” Aramis said intelligently. And, “Why -”

“Athos recused himself for personal reasons,” she said bluntly.

“But we. And.”

“Please do not worry: Delafere & Baudin provide as thorough a service as we can, whichever associate is seeing a client.”

“Is he ang-”

“It is extremely unprofessional to go around kissing a client, surely you see that?” Aramis wilted. “Between you and me,” Ms Baudin added, “Athos is an emotionally stunted idiot. Between you and me.”

“I really didn't mind it,” he said, very small. “Will you tell him that?”

Her eyes softened. “We serve a lot of people in vulnerable positions, Aramis. Even if you didn't object, it isn't… good, to get a reputation for… some things, however inaccurate.”

“Sexual favours,” Aramis said, straightening as ice water slipped down his spine. “I understand.”

She touched his wrist, her eyes serious behind silver-rimmed spectacles. “So do I. You've done nothing wrong here. And everything will be alright, I promise.”

He nodded mutely, then leapt to his feet and went to the zip, steeping a cup of honey-ginger tea for himself, orange pekoe for his visitor. “How else can I help you?” he said, bringing the steaming cups back when he trusted his hands not to shake.

“I couldn't find employment records or a residential address for 2012,” Sylvie said. “Were you in the country? It's important.”

“Dance instructor,” Aramis said, white-lipped. “A series of short-term contracts in Bath. Hang on.” He reached around the chipped teacup to the folder of papers the lawyer had brought, and ruffled through them. “Here. And I was couch-hopping, except for a couple of weeks at a backpackers’ hostel. I don't remember the name.”

The young woman brightened. “Thank you. Sorry I missed it.”

Aramis smiled mirthlessly. “My filing gets creative. I'm sorry, but can we keep this short? I've just remembered an engagement I need to get to.”

Sylvie smiled kindly at him. “Of course. My card if you need anything.” She drained her tea and left. He watched her go.

  


**

  


“You look like you've been hit by an Athos Special,” Anne said wryly from her seat on terraced brick steps, looking out over Ana's tiny garden. In the early bloom of evening a crowd had gathered around the charcoal-fed barbecue, where Porthos Vallon held court in a bright pink _Go Petunias_ t-shirt outlining his impressive physique, with a metal slice as his sceptre. Anne lifted her jamjar of colourless liquid in salute, and Aramis sat awkwardly beside her, two paper wrapped bunches of flowers dropped forgotten beside him.

“It isn't like that.”

“He's so very _good,_ ” she observed. “So proper, so honourable. I don't know how any flawed mortals survive in his radiance.”

Aramis smiled bitterly. “It's _really_ not like that.”

Anne shoved her jamjar into his hand, cool and sweating under his fingers, and gestured peremptorily to drink. “Moonshine is better shared.”

Aramis glanced up at a thumbnail of moon hanging over them in the blue-pink sky, and took a cautious sip, then sputtered outrageously at the burn. “What is Connie putting in this?”

Anne snickered. “Apples. Mostly apples.”

“Oh hey, Raw But Promising showed up.” They watched silently as Aramis and Ana's new student d'Artagnan, coltish and tall, moved through the crowd like a drop of liquid bronze. The neighbour, Lucie, said something inaudible, tucking a fair blonde curl behind one ear, and he brayed with laughter, responding in a burring Scottish accent, “Oh, aye, I've come down for the uni.”

The glass windowed door behind them opened and Constance came through, her hair in auburn braids, biting her lip with concentration as she navigated her Nanna in a silver-wheeled chair onto the little terrace.

“Brave heart, Anne,” Aramis said, squeezing her hand before leaping to his feet with a cheerful smile, bowing to the old lady. In the corner of his eye, he saw Anne rise, stately as a dreadnought under full sail, and sweep into the garden, smoothly interjecting herself between d'Artagnan and Lucie. Constance's smile fell, then Anne winked, her absinthe-green eyes full of mischief. The auburn-haired woman perked up again. Aramis smoothly offered two bundles of flowers, daisies and violets, to the old woman and the young.

He didn't see Anne, eyes half-lidded, put her finger to the boy's chin and tilt his face up for a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _latest in a series of supernatural romances_ \- the character he was reading just then is a half-fairy knight under a curse who is just about to betray the heroine, except it later turns out it was to save her life (complicated situation), and at the end of that book he dissolves in a cloud of butterflies. Same old, same old.
> 
> // _in a burring Scottish accent_ \- in the books, there's a strong connection made between Gascons and Highland Scots. So you'll just have to suffer as I butcher the language of my ancestors. Sorry, not sorry.


	7. How Nice To See The Rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really have no excuse for the lateness of this chapter. I'll understand if you've lost interest. But I got it done. Next one should be out soon.

Shortly after the… separation, Anne had given Athos a sculpture of angular twisted pipes. She was trying to prove something, he was certain, though what exactly remained unclear to him.

He kept it, on the murky ochre tan of his office wall, then the boring dutch-white repaint, and the soothing pale green after that, scraping his knuckles every time he unscrewed it from its fitting for the painter. It still sat over Sylvie’s desk, where it greeted every client who made it up the narrow stairs. What he was trying to prove by that… also remained unclear to him.

What he _did_ know, was that the office couch was a touch too narrow, and too stiff, to make a good bed and the desk chairs were not as ergonomic as advertised.

The angular pipes stared at him reproachfully in the grey morning light. “What?” he asked, rubbing his hand across his eyes and fumbling for the mug of coffee at his elbow. Cold.

Sylvie’s neat heels sounded on the stairs. “Right,” Athos told the sculpture, eased creaking out of his chair, and staggered into the inner office for his toothbrush.

He came out, hair combed and smelling of mouthwash, to see her tapping briskly at a keyboard, occasionally stopping to leaf through the stack of files he'd been working on that night, and the ones she’d brought in herself. “Catching up on the waifs and strays,” she said, not looking up. “I saw your boy, yesterday.”

“He's not my boy,” Athos said automatically, fumbling for the kettle. It began to boil at once with a malevolent grumble, already hot, and he pulled his fingers back.

“Such has been made clear,” Sylvie said dryly. “Not exactly a waif, either,” she said, eyebrows going up as she entered data into their files. “That was a swank school he went to...”

“Does it matter?” Athos rasped, gingerly pouring steaming water into the mug he’d been using last night. The smell of cheap instant coffee rose up, black as sin and sour as regret.

“Just getting a clearer picture of the issue,” the young woman muttered. “Can't find a record of scholarships, hmm. He likes tea, by the by.”

“It does not matter and I do not _care,”_ Athos replied. “You’re being cruel. Why did I take you on as a partner?”

“You _love_ me,” she replied.

“No. I do not.”

Her generous mouth widened in amusement, and he handed her a cup of her own, adorned with a repeating pattern of sunflowers. “Then I shall have to settle for ‘skilled, tenacious, and willing to pick up a new case on no notice’. And perhaps, Ninon Larroque’s phone number?” She looked at him more closely. “And you actually getting a good night’s sleep. Athos. You’re no good to us dead on your feet.”

Imperious green eyes met warm, brown ones, equally imperious. Sylvie raised one eyebrow. She reached behind her, tapped a key, and the stirring strains of _La Cumparsita_ filled the room.

Athos swore, and fled.

 

**

 

“Of course I’m not annoyed about you kissing d’Artagnan,” Constance said patiently, stepping down the rain-spattered street. “Why should I be annoyed? We’ve always been… easy-going… about kissing other people, and I’ve been putting you in a terrible situation with the, the -” she stepped accidentally in a puddle and a tendril of cold water seeped through a loose seam in her boot. She hissed in annoyance, looked around and realised they had just missed their bus, and hissed again. The open bench by the bus stop was soaking wet.

Anne looked at her, cheeks flushed pink in the cool air and fine tendrils of auburn hair curling damply on her forehead, and the side of her neck above the knitted turtle-neck of her jumper. Tiny crystal raindrops landed on her shoulders and melted into spreading damp. Anne lifted one hand, pulled back. “That’s alright then,” she said regally, tossing her head.

Behind them, Aramis unzipped a pocket of his dark nylon jacket and retrieved an umbrella, midnight blue with cherry-blossom petals scattered across it. He flourished it open, handed it forward to Anne, and looked at her expectantly.

“So you won’t mind,” Anne continued, setting the umbrella at an elegant angle across her shoulder, “if I take the lad dancing tonight.”

“Of course not,” said Constance warily.

Anne smiled, and strode across the street, skipping nimbly through sprays of water cast by oncoming traffic. An enormous truck roared past and she jigged and jagged, elegant and unstoppable, and disappeared in the cloud of spray..

Constance stood motionless, watching. Aramis caught her icy fingers. “Constance, my lovely,” he murmured, “umbrellas are meant to be shared.”

She glanced at him. “I’ve screwed this up, haven’t I?”

He shrugged. _“‘Fatal, soberbio, y bruto’,”_ he said lightly. She was starting to shiver, so he doffed his satchel and shrugged out of his enveloping jacket, draping it around her shoulders. “I’d follow her if I were you.”

“I was helping you with that thing,” Constance said, dwarfed in the jacket she clutched to herself.

“Go,” he ordered.

Aramis watched her trip across the street, her hair the only bright thing about her, and smiled crookedly. He shook his damp soggy hair while feeling in his satchel for his wallet, and the bus-pass tucked inside.

Not there. He felt in his jean pockets, then up to his… jacket, now gone. Ah.

 _“How nice to see the rain - and not get wet,”_ he muttered, squared his shoulders, and started walking.

A steel-blue car pulled up beside him, splashing his legs with spray from a puddle.

“Get in,” Athos ordered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // Why, yes, I _did_ lift the office sculpture from Tom Burke’s office in _Cormoran Strike_. (Which was fun: Strike has a rather different affect than Athos, but the hungover groan is, it’s identical.)
> 
> // Chapter title taken from a Spanish proverb I found here: https://www.thoughtco.com/more-spanish-proverbs-3079512
> 
>  _Qué bonito es ver la lluvia y no mojarse._ = How nice it is to see the rain and not get wet. (Don't criticize others for the way they do something unless you've done it yourself.)


	8. Such Small Hands

“Get in,” Athos ordered, gripping the steering wheel.

Through the window, Aramis looked at him, expressionless, only his eyes made bright by the rain.

“Mr Delafere,” he said at last, “I apologise.”

“You have nothing to apologise for,” Athos answered, heat blossoming in his cheeks like smallpox roses.

“I think I do,” Aramis said gently.

“Where do you need to go?” Athos asked. “Or I can give - _lend_ \- you the fare…”

“You are making this very difficult,” said Aramis, holding himself up to his full height, which was not inconsiderable. Then he sneezed. “It's really not -” Aramis continued, then pushed straggled and dripping hair back from his high forehead. He sneezed again. “I'm heading to the hospital,” he added, “I doubt it's on your way.”

Athos frowned, storms gathering behind his brows near as dark as the clouds above.

“I'm taking a class in the Parkinson's clinic,” Aramis explained, and grinned sharply at the lawyer's confusion..

“You cannot go into a sick-room dripping like that,” Athos said bluntly. “I can lend you a dry shirt. And a towel.” His mouth shut primly at the amusement in Aramis' eyes. “I shall not kiss you again.”

Aramis grinned again, mocking. “You pay so much attention to the syntax of things. _Achu!”_

“I am a fool, however,” Athos said dryly. “Get in.”

Aramis paused, tall and narrow, still as a stiletto balanced on a fingertip. Then some fine point of balance shifted in him, and he moved, clambering awkwardly into the passenger seat, his soggy denim-covered knees tucked up awkwardly until he found the lever to move the seat back from Sylvie’s daintier proportions He began to shiver again. Athos turned up the heat and started the car, the windscreen wipers a steady metronome against the hiss of rain and the blurry London traffic. He was doing this in a strictly philanthropic, professional capacity, only a cad would ignore someone about to come down with pneumonia...

Aramis had tilted his dripping head back against the headrest, eyelids fluttering faintly shut.

Damn it.

Athos ground his jaw tight until his head ached, stared straight ahead, and zipped around the corners.

 

**

 

 _”What if I want you to be angry?”_ Anne thought as she strode down the street, the heels of her boots snapping on the wet footpath. A sweet-faced gentleman with a comb-over and a fistful of yellow pamphlets saw her and veered rapidly to the side; two teenage skate-boarders watched her, riveted, as she stormed past. _”What if I want you to be jealous, to flinch at my scratches, to hurt at my nasty little jibes…?”_

She swung rapidly around a corner, stepped automatically around a pink-haired punk with old-school safety pin earrings and crutches to supplement a missing leg, and thought, _”What if I want you to trust me, too?_ Rage - or something hot and heavy like rage - knotted her throat, and she sagged automatically against a wall painted with cogwheel roses, holding the umbrella out like a shield to ward off impudent traffic and shutting her eyes. “Shit,” she said aloud. _This is why you’ll never be loved,_ she thought to herself, _not for long._

A hand covered hers, the fingers icy, and slid the handle of the umbrella out of it. Anne opened her eyes and saw Constance, eyes transparent as the rain and fragile mouth pursed in determination.

Something in her opened.

“Constance?”

The younger woman looked over her shoulder, startled.

“ Jacques-Michel?” she asked.

 

**

 

Aramis hovered awkwardly in the threshold of Athos’ upmarket flat. His eyes flicked around the neat furnishings in the front room - shades of oatmeal and steel grey, the heavy masculine lines of the lounge suite setting a mark on the room as final as the signature on a legal statement. There was a glossy, ornamental bamboo plant in one corner, its shoots twisted into stylised loops in a tall pot of speckled eggshell and the leaves glowing with health. He could not see a bookshelf, but a collection of _Home and Garden_ magazines rested in a colourful spray on top of the low coffee table.

The lawyer eased through the doorway, contriving to move past him without a single brush of skin or suit-jacket, though Aramis felt the warmth of the man. He tucked his hands in his damp pockets. He was here to get dry. He held back another sneeze.

“Bide.” Athos ducked into another room, coming back with a stack of grey towels, neatly folded and wrapped in paper blazoned by a local laundry service, and a poly-fleece jumper tagged with an impudent scarlet cavalier. Aramis received them gratefully, toeing out of his shoes and stripping off his sopping cardigan and t-shirt to drop without thought on the living room carpet. When Aramis glanced up, his host was looking pointedly out the window. Aramis bit back a laugh. He pulled the jumper over his head so that the hood of it fell over his eyes and pushed it back with a brief smile. All proper.

“Ah, tea!” Athos said. “You'll want tea.”

He opened the door into the kitchenette, shut it behind him, and clicked on his kettle. Then clicked it off and filled it from the tap. Clicked it on again. No tea bags. He rummaged in the litter of his cupboards and found a cellophane-wrapped, ribbon-garlanded package of leaf tea that his legal partner had presented him with several months ago. In a litter of vitamin bottles and wrappings from microwave meals, he dug out a one-cup teapot with an offensive yellow smiley face on it and dumped in the leaves.

Over the thrumming of the heating kettle, through the kitchen door, he heard footsteps and then the squawk of a poorly tended hinge. He dived back into the living room -

Aramis had hovered, awkward, on the porridgey carpet, unwilling to… _settle..._ as mysterious thumps and rattles came from the kitchen. The front room stared at him, bland and unwelcoming. Not even a bookshelf to peer at… _He has to read something,_ Aramis thought. The _Home and Garden_ magazines refrained from comment.

More thumps from the kitchen. Aramis tapped his fingers on his thigh, then tiptoed to the other door. _Separate library?_

It swung open at his touch, protesting but eager to move, and Aramis’ breath caught.

A step, behind him. “Don't tell Anne,” Athos bit out.

Aramis' eyes roved over the crooked array of empty wine bottles, the filthy bedding, and closed curtains leaving the bedroom in a noxious darkness, the smell of it like a blow. His expression smoothed into neutrality.

“I'm functional,” Athos added. “My work doesn't suffer. It's fine.”

Aramis took two barefoot steps towards him, still damp and tousled in Athos’ clothing.

“Don't pity me,” Athos said, harsh as a crow, and spluttered as Aramis’ arms came up and pulled him into a gentle embrace. He huffed, and settled his chin on the other man's shoulder.

“Shh,” Aramis murmured. “You've done very well. But everyone gets tired.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // How's that for good intentions? Heh. Heheh. BwahahahaHAhaHA
> 
> // _“I'm taking a class in the Parkinson's clinic,”_ \- Yes, this is actually a thing: 
> 
> https://parkinsonslife.eu/tango-treatment-dance-to-improve-your-parkinsons/  
> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150413140908.htm
> 
> // With apologies to e. e. cummings: 
> 
> https://genius.com/E-e-cummings-since-feeling-is-first-annotated  
> https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/somewhere-i-have-never-travelledgladly-beyond


	9. Axis, or, Rumour That Flies On Partridge Wings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I was incredibly torn between two different chapter titles, so you can have both at once.

“It’s alright,” a gawky girl with boyish-cut hair said to Athos, sitting comfortably beside him in a simple chair, “nobody here eats Newbies. Well, maybe that one time.”

He stirred in his own simple chair, the two of them buried in an array of people sitting around the walls of a large lino-floored room, lit with fluorescents and decorated with gaudy flower-prints in basic frames. “I trust you will be gentle with me.” Her shy smile blossomed. At the head of the room, Aramis’ light tenor directed his class to stick their left legs and their right arms out, then do the same on the other side. Athos complied, awkwardly. The man on his other side, an elderly hawk-nosed Silk that he used to face with defiant trepidation in the courtroom followed along, swinging his limbs in the vaguely ridiculous exercises with the composure of long practice. Athos hadn’t even known the man had been ill. 

_I shouldn’t be here,_ Athos thought. _I really, really shouldn’t be here._

They had stood together, he and Aramis, in the front room of his flat, standing close enough to feel the other’s breathing, his heartbeat, married in their bodies. Then, “I have to step back now,” Aramis had murmured in his ear. And the man had, with startling efficiency, bustled them both into Athos’ car and chivvied Athos to the hospital. And here he was.

“I don’t have Parkinson’s,” he blurted to the girl, as in the front Aramis and a gentle, dark-eyed doctor demonstrated the footwork they’d be working on today. 

“Neither does my husband,” she said, nodding to a curly-haired boy in glasses across the room who didn’t look old enough to shave. Her head tilted back suddenly, back and to the side, then she brought herself upright and continued as if nothing had happened. “Constance isn’t here today? Dr Lemay must be disappointed.”

“Constance is getting married,” Athos said firmly. They were still going through with it, the fools.

“Oh?” the girl looked thrilled. But, “Please tell me it isn’t her ex.”

Athos said nothing. She didn’t know about Anne?

“No bets on who gets to be the Head Bridesmaid,” the girl said wryly. “But you tell them I can throw flowers with the best of them.

“Dip him!” someone called from the back of the room, and Aramis’ demonstration partner, the doe-eyed, gentle doctor, stuttered and stammered with Aramis in his arms.

 _I have to step back now,_ Aramis had said. Athos’ ears burned.

“Dip!” the girl next to Athos chimed in, and others, _Dip! Dip! Dip!_ and Aramis twinkled a smile, whispered in Lemay’s ear, and fell swooping back, sharp and graceful as a bulldancer’s cape in the doctor’s tentative, cradling arms. The room erupted into applause. Aramis straightened up, tugging the jumper he’d borrowed from Athos - a relic from his fencing club, and never worn - down to hide the strip of bare skin so briefly revealed. Casual, fleeting, a gesture of no weight at all. The heat in Athos’ ears seemed fit to shame the sun.

The old Silk beside him clicked his tongue, “That boy really is as lovely as his mother.

Aramis stepped lightly to the battered black soundsystem in the corner and cheerful violins began to play with brass in the hall. “Slow, slow, quick-quick, slow,” he reminded the class, and grinned. “Now find a partner!”

Athos let the girl beside him fix him with her glittering eye and set her hands on him. She knew what she was doing, far better than he did, so he concentrated on his feet, slow, slow, quick-quick, slow, as she manoeuvred him around the echoing floor, and trusted her to keep them steady.

“I have to step back now,” Aramis had murmured, so gently, to Athos, _“o nunca te dejaria.”_ Athos had enough Spanish, barely, to follow it. _Or never would I, never never never…_ He swore to himself, viciously. _Never._

Slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. 

 

**

 

“Constance?”

She looked over her shoulder on the rainy street, startled. 

“Jacques-Michel?” she asked.

Jacques-Michel Bonacieux, as it turned out, was a tall thin man with brushy, landscaped hair and a surprisingly well-cut suit. He looked at Constance, and Anne behind her, smiled with benevolence, and took off his rain-spattered, round-lensed spectacles to wipe them with a cloth. “It’s been so long,” he said. “We never talk anymore.”

“Well, no,” said Constance, “not since you dumped me.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

Anne touched Constance’s slender shoulder.

“Jacques-Michel,” Constance asked, “do you remember the things you said?”

The man looked politely blank, as he tucked his glasses-cloth away and set his spectacles back on his nose.

“At the end. And the letter you wrote.”

His brow crinkled in thought, then cleared. “Oh, yes. Constance, it’s important for me to say…”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I forgive you.” 

“Do you?” Constance asked. 

“Yes. And you're quite welcome to your old job at the boutique. (It hasn't been the same without you),” he added kindly.

“That's… nice,” Constance said. “And…?”

He looked confused. “Well, I can't ask you to marry me again,” he said. “Feelings need to heal, first. It was a difficult time for me.”

Through her hand on Constance's shoulder, Anne could feel her lover shaking. She squeezed in reassurance, or warning,

“Jacques,” Constance said, “I couldn't possibly interrupt your life. Besides, I'm getting married soon. It wouldn't work out.”

His face brightened. “Congratulations! Do I know the lucky fellow?”

“I doubt it. I hope,” she added carefully, “that someday you find the person that really suits you.”

 

**

 

They walked, hand in hand, down the street, through the hissing of passing traffic and the scattering sparks of grey rain. At last, Constance said, “There were all these things I was going to say to him. I had a list. And it all just stuck.”

Anne squeezed her hand.

“He didn’t even _remember._ How can someone be that, that _horrid_ and not even remember?”

Anne said nothing. The forgetting of things had never cursed herself or Athos.

“We were having a fight,” Constance said vaguely.

“I suppose we were,” Anne answered, and found herself crowded against a wall, the concrete chill against her back, Constance’s cool fingertips tracing spirals on her temple and her cheek. “Is d’Artagnan a good kisser?” she asked, eyes clear as water.

“Passable,” Anne shrugged.

“I’m going to make you forget all about him,” Constance growled, touching a tendril of Anne’s loosened hair.

It was like a little girl dressing up as a pirate, a kitten jumping on a mastiff’s ear. Half of this was distraction for Constance herself, probably. Anne dropped her eyes to her lover’s mouth, then back to the girl’s eyes. She smiled wickedly. “Well, you can _try…”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // (With the understanding that I’m writing about something with which I have no direct experience, neither Parkinson’s or Tango.) From what I’ve read, as well as the general health benefit of a low-impact, social exercise group, the regular rhythms of the music help the listener cut through twitches and bodily stutters, many of the heel-and-toe and backwards-walking exercises in a tango class are near identical to physiotherapy routines, and worse-comes-to-worse, if you lose your balance you’ve got someone stable right there to hang onto. And it’s fun. 
> 
> // _“o nunca te dejaria.”_ \- If I haven't entirely ballsed up the Spanish, that means, "or I would never leave you." I am open to correction if I did this badly.
> 
> // Edit To Add: Athos isn't getting that jumper back.


	10. Interlude, With Porthos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He's not really a main character in this story, but he wanted a scene so here we are. Apologies for the length - the next chapter is almost written, it just kept complaining when I wanted to include it with this bit. Stories are like that sometimes.

Porthos was a simple man with a complicated life.

He manoeuvred the tip of his steaming iron around the neck of one of his work shirts and talked into the phone wedged awkwardly between his ear and shoulder. “You still want a stag night. For the fake wedding.”

_ “It’s not fake,” _ Aramis said fuzzily, the signal staticky and erratic.  _ “There are papers to sign and everything.” _

Porthos sighed. From the other room he heard the disordered blare of the television where his eldest kid Jules and young Louis (here for a sleepover) sat on the floor watching a cartoon while the latest foster, hunched and silent on the couch, watched with them. Marie-Cessete was already in her crib and he could hear her gurgling faintly over the baby monitor. Elodie would be home in half an hour.  Porthos squared his shoulders. “And we’re not going to the Hart and Hind but that Iranian place that does the really nice tea?”

_ “That is correct,” _ Aramis’ voice was still patchy. The monitor was interfering with the phone, probably. Or the battery. 

Porthos hung up his shirt, flicked another one over his board, let the clean steam of the iron roam over it. “Why?”

_ “Athos is coming.” _

“Hang on.”

_ “My cabbages!!!” _ the television howled and the children, even the Pepin kid, chortled.

“Last one and then you’re brushing your teeth,” he called softly to the kids. He’d have to pack Jules’ things tonight - the boy was spending a week with his Mum soon.

“The lawyer that kissed you on the dance-floor and then dumped you by proxy,” he asked Aramis, softly, so the children would not hear, “that lawyer, is coming along.”

_ “Yes.” _

“By proxy.”

_ “Ms Baudin was very nice about it, I thought.” _

Porthos rolled his eyes.

“For tea,” he added, for clarity.

_ “Is there ever not a good time for really nice tea?” _

“With the lawyer that sorta-kinda-not-really-but-actually-yes accused his wife of a capital crime?” It had been Porthos’ first case as DCI Treville’s bagman, the details graved deep on his youthful memory.

_ “He what?” _ For a brief, hopeful second Aramis sounded shaken, but then:  _ “Well, they’re going to brunch tomorrow so I suppose it all worked out.” _

Porthos swore under his breath.

_ “The -” _ static  _ “- nd I just really need a party, okay?” _

“Hang on.” The cartoon was ending. Porthos dropped the phone into his hand and poked his head into the living room.  _ “Teeth,”  _ he droned, in his biggest, goofiest voice,  _ “pyjamas, bedtime.” _ Jules looked mulish, then shifted, and the other children followed his lead. Aramis was still on the staticky line when he put it back to his ear.

“Then okay. The tea-joint it is. Who’s coming?” He scribbled down names - Dr Lemay, Athos (Christ), the new tango students d’Artagnan and that guy Rochefort, a few others. Elodie was on bitch-shifts all this month. They could get a sitter, probably. Fleur or Therese? Yeah, they’d do. He shuffled his calendar in his head. “Thursday?”

_ “The Lord bless you, Porthos.” _ __  
__  
“Yeah, yeah,” Porthos grumbled. The baby monitor was crackling again. “Talk later.” He comforted himself with the knowledge that, next time he saw Ana, he could tell her he’d won their bet. Again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // "the Pepin kid" is there because her mother had an accident and is currently recovering in hospital. Porthos and Elodie take her to visit often and the two families end up as great friends, because this is a story and I get to make the rules. (Porthos and Elodie just seemed the type to have a foster or two, yeah?)
> 
> // _as DCI Treville's bagman_ \- I am informed that, in the context of British police, a bagman is someone who drives the car and carries the bags for a particular senior officer, as well as running errands and doing any other gruntwork, and that the position implies a lot of mentoring. Like having an apprentice.


	11. The Look of the Thing

Athos had chosen a cafe for their meeting. A small place on a side street, with a scattering of morning patrons dotted around the small tables and paintings from local artists adorning the cream walls. It was nice enough. Nothing that either he or Anne would remember, or find familiar. No fine restaurant with candles like stars and the silverware laid in ranks four deep around moon-faced plates, where they consulted _sommeliers_ for the best wine for each luxurious dish. No greasy-spoon caff where they came in blushing and damp to down mugs of builder’s tea and plates of greasy chips before dancing back into the spring rain. No -

He flattened his hands on the varnished tabletop and picked a colour to find in the room. White: a daisy in a vase; the china of the mugs; the cuff of his shirtsleeve. Blue: chalk on the Specials board; forget-me-nots on another table; a sign outside - the sunlight through the windows was wan and pale, a tremulous smile after the weeping rain of yesterday.

He checked his watch again. Still too early - she wasn’t late at all. Black: the knitted cap of a student hunched over a tablet, an earbud crammed precariously into one ear; the ink lines of a flower on the wall; the black bobbed hair of a Korean lady sitting by an elderly man from Leeds, cups steaming untouched as they navigated a first date.

A baby-faced server brought coffee: black, heady, rich. A drop of whiskey in it would spoil the flavour, he told himself, and stirred in three teaspoons of sugar instead. It occurred to him that he had not thought of Aramis-in-the-rain for three whole hours. _Well, bollocks._

 

*

 

 _“The next language proficiency exam is on Friday.”_ Sylvie’s voice, through the earbuds he’d attached to the phone in his pocket, was tinny but clear. Aramis would still, when it came down to it, rather not hear this as he worked.

“Sylvie,” he answered carefully, running his hand along an empty shelf and coming up only dust, “I grew up here.”

_“Yes.”_

He pulled books down from another shelf one by one, opening the battered covers and riffling through the pages. “I regularly engage in paid employment wherein I say things aloud in English, with, dare I say, some facility.”

_“I am aware.”_

“And I’m supposed to pay a hundred and fifty quid to prove my mastery of the past imperfect and the future subjunctive.” The earbud was slipping: he shoved it more firmly in his ear and eyed the bookcase speculatively.

_“Delafere & Baudin can spot you the fee out of our discretionary fund if you need it.” _

“Thank you, no.” He levered the bookcase out from the wall, peering into the gap - nothing but dust and darkness.

 _“Aramis,”_ Sylvie said sharply, _“you will ace this exam. It will tick a box and put one more document in the pile I’m putting together. And then, Aramis, I will take that pile and I will beat them over the head with it. Until they weep blood.”_

Despite himself he smiled. “You really do say the nicest things.”

_“I talked with Accounts at your publishing firm. They claim it was a clerical error and you should get your commission paid by Monday. Do you want me to hurry them along?”_

After a breath Aramis said, “I’m very tired, Sylvie.”

_“... I understand.”_

He heard the rustle of her movement over the phone.

 _Don’t say it,_ he thought. _I haven’t kissed Athos, or danced with him. Not even a touch, since -_

But she said only, _“I’ll pick you up Friday morning, give you a lift.”_

“Done,” he smiled, and heard the polite click as she ended the call.

“Aramis?”

He turned and saw Ana in the doorway, shopping bags dangling unnoticed from her delicate fingers as she saw what had happened to her front room.

 

*

 

Pink: a pair of carnations in a vase; a woman’s cardigan; fingernails, trimmed short and painted with a subtle, shell-like tint, tapping idly on the wood in front of him. Athos looked up, shocked. Anne watched him speculatively from the other side of the table. Her dark dress was cut simply, the chaste neckline showing the sweet points of her collarbones, the long, vulnerable line of her throat cut only by a string of pale jade beads that matched her eyes. If she wore make-up he could not detect it. Once she’d left lipstick like bloody roses on the stand by their bed, kept nails sharp to dig into his back when they made love… she’d laughed like springtime, he remembered that, dark hair wild about her - it was braided loosely over one shoulder today.

“Athos?”

Mouth dry, throat dry, he croaked, “Anne.”

She sat down, and folded her hands neatly in front of her.

“The dress is new.”

“... Constance made it.”

“It’s beautiful.” He bit his tongue. Did he sound like he was flirting?

She watched him, unreadably, then said, “She’s in the last year of her design course. You should see what she put together for the Theatrical segment.”

“I’m sure it’s lovely.”

“Yes.”

“Can I get you, something to drink? Food.” Athos waved one hand helplessly.

She smiled as she always had, as if covering a wealth of secrets. “You know what I like.”

He leaped up and found a place in the queue, a slow awkward shuffle where he did not have to look at her at all. When he came back there was a flutter of white cloth in her hand, quickly tucked away in her purse.

 _“He longed to love her,”_ said Aramis, _“to know her, as darkness knows the flower -”_

Athos froze.

Across the room the student with the black cap scrambled desperately for the jack of his earbuds, knocked out of his tablet with the voice of his talking book now singing loud to the cafe -

_“- tucked between each shade of petal and cradling it in the tender ni-”_

Aramis’ voice cut off abruptly.

“That’s _Lilac In Shadow,”_ Anne said, her petal-pink mouth twitching at the corners. “One of the early ones. A bit silly but Constance adores them. Don’t tell Aramis.”

Athos sat down.

“Your _face,”_ she said. “You can’t imagine. Athos. Your _face.”_ The white handkerchief appeared again and she dabbed carefully at her eyes as she howled with laughter.

“If you have quite fin-”

“Hah!”

 

*

 

Ana’s eyes strayed over the storm-struck chaos of her front room, the opened boxes and haphazard book stacks - Aramis stepped back to the bookcase and shoved it back with his shoulder. He lifted his hands. “There is an explanation,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _and picked a colour to find in the room_ \- that’s an actual grounding technique, if anyone’s interested.
> 
> // _builder’s tea_ \- unfancy but strong black tea, generally brewed in the cup with milk added after. I spent far too long in this chapter double-checking British colloquial terms and I hope you appreciate the effort. (In New Zealand, by the by, we call it “gumboot tea”. Knowing is half the battle!)
> 
> // _It occurred to him that he had not thought of Aramis-in-the-rain for three whole hours._ \- He lost The Game!
> 
> // Constance made the dress and she has a lot of feelings about Anne’s collarbones, so.


End file.
